Posted on 04/08/2021 12:25:49 PM PDT by Dacula
Bees are nice but I've had a few incidents with hornets, as in running over ground nests, so I'm not that fond of stinging insects.
Add me. Only because without Bee’s civilization would eventually die away.
Thank you!
“One thing I figured out real quick though was if you are in bear country make sure your hives are well protected!”
It isn’t just bears you have to worry about. There are more skunks and they will keep coming back every night until all your bees are gone.
The bees won’t fly at night, but they will come out if something is messing around with the hive. Skunks will eat the bees as soon as they come out.
A solar charger and a strand of low elec fence will get rid of the skunks.
I almost took the plunge a couple of years ago. Studied like crazy. Priced out equipment. My neighbor down the road had some hives and he was going to teach me. I kept putting it off, and unfortunately he acquired ALS and deteriorated quite quickly. I never picked back up the idea but would love to try it some day.
Not currently a beekeeper. I tried once and lost both hives, and I hope to try again at some point. I would love to join such a list if you start one.
Please add me to your list. I would love to know more before I start. Thank you.
Taking this year off (all my hives died off), but I would like to be added to your ping list, please.
All beekeepers lose hives. I know guys that are master beekeepers and know guys who never inspect, never feed and let the bees do their thing. They all lose around a third of their hives a year.
I treat each hive a little differently. Some hive do great on their own, others need a little help. Each have had their personality.
Some hives a suit-up to open, others I can open up, inspect and even harvest while wearing shorts and a tee shirt.
Put me on, please.
LOL. Hey, I resemble that remark!
I’d like to join just to read it. Bees are important and amazing creatures.
Installing packages means......
When you buy bees they come in “packages” which is a wood frame box that has wire mesh on two sides. The bees are sold by the pound. There will also be a little cage with the queen bee inside. And usually a can of sugar water mixture. When installing, you open the box and dump the bees into a prepared hive box, leaving the package lying beside the hive for the rest of the day so that all the straggling bees get into the box (they will be attracted to the pheromones of the queen). The little queen is left in the little queen cage, and inserted between the hive frames. After a few days the bees come to accept her as their “queen” and it becomes safe to let her out of the cage. Some queen cages are equipped with a hole plugged with a candy plug. The bees will eat the candy, breaking through the hole in a couple of days, so it works like an automated “timer” to release the queen.
The can of sugar water is poured into a “feeder” that is attached to the hive, and will supply the hive with some “food” to get them started. Hopefully by the time they use up the sugar water, there will be adequate plants blooming nearby for them to forage.
Splitting hives is a procedure we do in the spring to make new hives. When the well-established hives are very full of bees, we can remove some of the frames into new hive boxes, switching out those frames with empty frames which the established hive will quickly refill. We have to supply the new hive will need a queen, so we give it one which we either buy or better yet rear ourselves, Queen rearing is an exciting procedure where we very carefully take less than 3 day-old eggs from a strong hive and employ them in little cups into a hive with no queen. The bees will quickly go to work tending those eggs (hoping to get a new queen) until they hatch. The day before they are expected to hatch, we remove the Pupa at that stage and install them into the hives that need new queens, and they the queens emerge in their new hives.
Hope this helps explain. I’ll post some photos of all this when I have time.
Yeah, I knew going in that it was a possibility. But life got complicated and getting a new hive keeps dropping to the bottom of the priority list.
Maybe I should say, I lost one hive and “misplaced” the other. They didn’t like the home I made for them and moved out. They were different enough from the wild bees in my area that I can still spot their descendants buzzing around. I just haven’t tracked them to their new home yet :)
Let me know if you want on or off the BeeFreeping Ping List.
This is a new adventure for me. Please be patient as I work out any issues. This is an open forum and everyone’s input would be appreciated.
“You must remember that you are a beginner for the first 20 years.” - Eva Crane, Beekeeping researcher, and author.
Sugars make up about 95% of honey, explaining how the substance became synonymous with sweetness and a food staple of bee colonies, which repeatedly digest and regurgitate flower nectar to produce it.
But people have also historically used honey as an ointment, hinting at anti-inflammatory properties that researchers are now investigating. Some of that research suggests honey can act on a protein called NLRP3, which triggers beneficial inflammation during immune responses but has also been implicated in diabetes, Alzheimer’s and other diseases.
A multidisciplinary team of Nebraska researchers, led by Jiujiu Yu, went searching for overlooked components of honey that could help explain its anti-inflammatory activity. When they did, they found so-called extracellular vesicles: tiny membrane-protected particles that often carry proteins, ribonucleic acids and other biomolecules from one cell to another and have been identified in many foods.
The honey-housed vesicles contained 142 proteins from plants and 82 from honey bees, consistent with a nanoparticle produced by a flower, then consumed and regurgitated by the bees.
To test whether the vesicles themselves help combat inflammation, the team placed them alongside white blood cells that produce the inflammation-triggering NLRP3 protein, then kickstarted inflammatory processes. The vesicles substantially reduced the production and secretion of multiple inflammation-causing proteins, along with the inflammation-related death of certain cells. And when the team injected mice with the vesicles, it found that the nanoparticles partly alleviated both inflammation and drug-induced liver injury.
The researchers identified microribonucleic acids, or microRNAs, as the main anti-inflammatory cargo within the vesicles, even pinpointing a particular microRNA most responsible for the effects.
Further studies would need to establish whether and how vesicles consumed via honey actually curb inflammation in people, the researchers said. Studying how they interact with bacteria in the human gut could be a worthwhile starting point.
That makes a hella lotta sense. In a bit of synchronicity, honey BBQ wings on the grill.
I am in. Even though the bear got my honey and killed my bees two years ago. I might re-establish. Only made it through 2 years.
That was my mistake.
I’d like “on” please. More power to ya!
What’s gold and black and goes “zub, zub, zub”?
(a bee flying backwards)
I am a prospective beekeeper. We are moving to the country and I want to keep bees and chickens.
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